Augment - By Chris Miller

Certain things in life are private, personal, and not open to sharing: bank account statements, take-home pay stubs, sexual exploits (or lack thereof), journals/blogs. But when Chris Miller (see My Must Reads—Blogs from the War Room) mentioned writing "not a rebuttal, but something to augment [my To Write post]" I insisted on putting it up here, in its entirety and without comment. So with thanks (again), here's Chris:

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Just received my two complimentary copies of Cosmos—The Science of Everything in the mail, and seen, for the first time, a story of mine in a commercial publication. What a rush. They did a fantastic job—commissioned Tristan Schane to do this amazing 12x24 oil painting for it, which she told me took her 3 weeks including research and thinking. Even got my name at the bottom of the cover: FICTION BY CHRISTOPHER K. MILLER & LIZ MARTIN. And now I’m thinking Liz wishes her parents had given her a longer name.

Yeah I’ll crash and fade into reality soon enough. But this morning I’m feeling pretty professional and swell. Tallying up my income from the last two years of writing I see I’ve earned 800 + 75 + 10 + 10 + 10 dollars, less Paypal deductions and one three-dollar entry fee. So I’ve earned 905 dollars in two years, mostly in US funds, but also one Amazon gift certificate. That’s over 25 cents an hour probably… or maybe not… but it still qualifies me as a pro, and so it’s from this lofty perch that I now share everything I think I’ve learned about creative writing.

Instead of just enumerating all the “mistakes” I see beginners make on the forums over and over and saying “don’t do that,” I’m going to look at these as part of a growth process, an important stage in each person’s development as a writer. I’m pretty sure every new writer fantasizes about popular acclaim and financial success. I know I do. But the real underlying reason I write is to remember, think and feel. To grow. Writing puts me in touch with my memories, thoughts and emotions. It exercises my imagination. Also, as the owner of a pretty annoying obsessive-compulsive personality, I’ve wrestled a few addictions in my life. I know a thing or two about addiction. Writing is a heady drug.

This brings me to my first (and also last) stage of writing:


Self Gratification

Writing is like sex. For most of us, our first experience probably does not involve anyone else. My first character is based on me. He has my views and opinions. In fact, initially, all he does is expound my views and opine my opinions. Later, I will introduce other characters to rescue, kill, hang out or have sex with—depending on my mood. If I like to drink, I’ll drink a lot. If I like to make out, I’ll do that.

Of course I will not begin by just blurting out, “I got drunk and Mary let me feel her breasts.” I am a literary writer. Mood and setting are important. Preparation is important. As a literary writer, I am very concerned with choosing, not just the right words, but as many of them as possible. I will make sure that every noun has a weighty adjective or two in front of it and that for every verb there is an adverb. I will expand my vocabulary. I will clarify everything. The sun will not merely set into the pines. Oh, no. The crimson orb of the smoldering globular sun will plummet into the towering verdant trees of the ominous dark forest like a double-banked three-ball dropping into the side pocket. See how much better that is, especially the part about the three-ball, because I like to play pool too. I will have depth. I will explain that my feelings for Mary reach right down to the very core of my essence. I will try to use the words “shards” and “soul” in connection with this if I can. Probably I will try to work in a moral lesson too so that if my mom reads it she’ll see how mature and wise and sensitive I’ve turned out. Then I’ll feel her tits (Mary’s, not my mom’s). Then I’ll jerk off. There’s nothing wrong with the self gratification stage of writing. Many popular authors never leave it. And, no matter how much I evolve as a writer, it will always be a part of my work. Just as we as humans still contain elements of the life forms from which we evolved.


Sympathy

I’m still using too many adjectives and mixing up its and it’s, and your and you’re. Maybe my quote tag punctuation’s still a little screwy. But I’ve started to twig that others do not enjoy reading my work as much as I or my mom do. That my readers, like my friends, don’t care how deeply I love Mary, or that her eyes are like bottomless woodland pools, or that her sweet laughter’s as infectious as Chlamydia. They just want to know how far she let me go and what was said before, during and after, including the embarrassing stuff—especially the embarrassing stuff. And while I’d like things to go smoothly and be told how great I am and how no one’s ever satisfied her like that before, my friends would rather I unloaded in my shorts but still somehow caught Herpes and made her pregnant so that now her big brother who’s a biker is looking to kick my ass. I’ve come to see that my difficulties and failures are much more interesting than my achievements. Suffering is more entertaining than comfort. Really, anything is more entertaining than comfort.


Disassociation

I’ve come to realize that not only do I not know how my characters feel, I don’t care. No one does. We only care how we ourselves would feel in their situations. To read that “Mary was terribly, terribly unhappy” does not evoke much feeling in me. But to read that “Mary butted her cigarette high inside her thigh and sighed,” gets me imagining how she felt. That just telling how my characters feel kind of ruins it for me. Even in the first person, where I know my narrator’s thoughts and memories, I really don’t know him any better than my readers do, or he himself does. That we must discover him, and thereby ourselves, together in our own ways. Writing is getting harder now. It was a LOT easier finding interesting words than it is finding interesting sentences. It was a lot easier fantasizing than living too.


Clarity and Concision

I’m learning better what to leave out, what should be left to the reader. I’ve also started to ease up on the turgid descriptors and to use contractions more. I don’t write “might have” when “might’ve” will do, or “there is” when “there’s” works. I use possessives more. And hyphens. Now, instead of writing, “The yellowing wallpaper on the walls of Mary’s bedroom with roses on it was probably older than she was,” I might write, “Mary’s bedroom’s yellowing rose-print wallpaper was…” Clarity and concision often go hand in hand. I’ve discovered that words can also be saved by combining sentences or using sentence fragments. And by mixing these up, my prose will be less monotonous. If I want to give extra impact to a sentence, I make it short and precede it with a run-on.

Writing just keeps getting harder. Because now that I’m writing simply and concisely, it’s easier to see that a lot of it just isn’t interesting. Mary took a cigarette out of her purse and asked me for a light. I pushed the car’s lighter in with my knee. Then together, we waited for it to pop back out. When it did, I pulled it from the dash and held it out to her… ah who cares. Keeping word count down is not about staying under competition limits and within submissions guidelines. It’s about letting your reader do less work for the same or better bang.


Credibility and Patience

In place of grandiloquent descriptors and flat narrative, I’m starting to use specifics. But specifics take research, a kind of expertise. And I don’t know anything about wallpaper patterns or the ’83 Chevy Impala. I don’t know anything about antiques or horses or modern art either, or what the name of Nashville’s college football team is, or whether or not Chicago’s Wrigley Field has a Jumbotron, or how to make ricin, or what life’s like in the Gaza strip. But if I want my stories and characters to seem real, I have to find out. This was probably a LOT harder before the internet. I’ve also stopped posting pieces I wrote in half-an-hour, or a day-and-a-half. Writing is about ideas and idea density. I’m not talking about scientific facts, philosophical musings and personal epiphanies, although these can be good too. Ideas can be apt and even poetic descriptions, connecting seemingly disparate things, character nuances, and even clever turns of phrase. An idea is anything that clicks. I now know that I will probably read everything I write dozens if not hundreds of times. If nothing clicks in a sentence, why make myself suffer through it again and again? Wouldn’t my story—my life—be better off without it? Maybe it’s necessary to know that Fred drove home from the office, took off his shoes, patted his dog, took a leak and poured himself a rye and ginger before turning on the TV and seeing that he’d just won the Powerball lottery. But maybe it isn’t.

So I’m asking myself, how do I resolve concision and patience? I don’t want idealess sentences and a lot of empty descriptors. But I don’t want my stories to rush childishly and breathlessly forward in an “and then… and then… and then” sort of way either. Details like leaves falling or birds nesting or a boy throwing a newspaper onto your driveway from his bicycle can be used to put the reader in a scene and make the narrative less linear. But they can also bore and distract. Here’s how I decide. If I’m incorporating sentences only to get my story from point A to point B, it’s poor concision, flat and weak. Trying to connect all my scenes into one big duller one is a bad thing. But if I’m using them as sort of non sequiturs or asides to pace or broaden a scene, they’re probably indicative of patience, poetic and okay.


Cohesion and Depth

So I’ve described an interesting and believable series of events involving real and likable (and hate-able) characters, but because these events are unrelated (except that they all happen to the same guy) my story’s only an entertaining anecdote. It doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t penetrate. This is where motif, symbol and allegory come into play. They connect the pieces of my story, and my story to the world at large. Say Mary’s biker brother beats me up after I’ve come in my boxers and she’s given me Herpes and I’ve made her pregnant. This is interesting. Readers might enjoy seeing this happen. Now suppose it was this biker brother who gave her the Herpes. Now readers can see how my premature ejaculation and general embarrassment, naivety and inexperience might’ve been a sort of relief and change of pace for her and is what actually allowed me to move on around the bases and knock her up. Even if I can’t see it—especially if I can’t. By connecting the biker brother to the story and promoting Herpes to a motif, suddenly the conflict and characters are deepened. Suppose Mary and I wander bare-legged into a patch of stinging nettles while walking in the woods. Stinging becomes a connecting theme. Our infatuation has allowed us to become trapped in this painful situation. Maybe I pick her up and carry her out. Maybe I try to stop her from burning her thigh with her cigarette. See how suddenly, because of this stinging/burning motif or symbol, actions take on deeper meanings? The more elements of a story that are tied together, the deeper it’ll run. An allegory to Cupid’s stinging arrow might strengthen the motif. That the baby might not be mine, but instead her father’s (this is one dysfunctional family), could connect my Mary to the Virgin Mary. I try to connect a story’s elements through plot, motif, allusion, and poetic devices like simile and metaphor. The more I can tell a story in terms of itself and allegory the deeper it will become.


Self Gratification (again)

To me, a lot of professional writers, especially novelists, are the equivalent of good mall landscape painters. They crank out the same content and quality over and over. If I want to earn a living writing, I’ll have to learn to do this—to write for the largest demographic. I’ll have to read what sells and try to mimic it in some original, but not too original, way. Then I’ll have to market myself. This has gotten a lot harder. With the internet and word processing, more and more people are writing and entertain hopes of striking it rich and becoming famous. It’s harder to find an agent today than it used to be to find publishers. It might be helpful to work up a CV by winning competitions and getting credible smaller publications under my belt. To do this I’ll need to read the magazines I target and winners of the competitions I wish to enter so that I can emulate their styles and themes.

But this all strikes me as a lot of work that, while it might see me more widely read, will not really improve me as a writer or a person. One can have too many lovers. And I would rather “publish” to a few trusted others who know me and who’ll share their minds and eyes than millions of strangers who give nothing. This is what’s gratifying. And, paradoxically, I can’t help but feel that this is the path to success.